Can Obama Lose? Will he be a one-term president?

Makes it more fun, which way do you lean now (even if only slightly)?



It's going to be Romney. Perry needs lightning to win, and the others need not to be circus freaks, which is not in the cards.



Not gonna happen, the economy is almost never not the #1 issue, it would take an event like 9/11 to change that. Its the economy, stupid.

I think that rosborne979 is absolutely right that Obama's chances will go largely as the economy does. War is pretty much the only thing that changes politics as significantly and predictably as economy does and the only way the economy won't be the top issue is if it improves dramatically or something much worse happens.



He can and should try to get on the right side of this economic issue in the hearts and minds of Americans, but the problem is that most people aren't paying attention to anything other than their wallet, and if it's lean they are pissed at the incumbents and that's that (for them). I don't think things are going to get much better for them either, unemployment benefits are going to start running out and I can't imagine an economic recovery that will make it to that level (employment rates are not a leading indicator, they trail the recovery and those folks are at the end of the totem pole when jobs are handed out).

When the economy gets this bad, the national conscience is to lynch and demand "off with their heads." Few care about nuances like figuring out why things are bad, those are complex issues that experts don't agree on, they are just fed up and not going to take it anymore and they notice whether it happens on your watch more so than whether you are genuinely culpable.



I don't think it really works this way, you may be a bit idealistic about expecting the unwashed masses to put as much thought into their choices as you do. Not having any plans may be a deal breaker for you but it certainly isn't an impediment to winning an election. If you have 60 seconds to elucidate your position in a political debate it's much easier to pull a "you're no Jack Kennedy" and put down your opponent than take the policy wonk approach. An anti-incumbent platform is the most common way to get elected, you don't need a great plan (just enough to make it hard for others to attack you as having no plan) because it's easier to just attack the incumbent (or the opponent in general, for that matter).

That's what Obama did to get elected, he largely just portrayed himself as the anti-thesis to the current administration and campaigned on "change". He didn't win because his plans were amazing but because there was a groundswell of dissatisfaction with the incumbent party. Obama doesn't have the anti-incumbency arrow in his quiver this time but he'll likely still use a variation of this technique by making this a referendum on character. That is, it's easier to say why someone else is the wrong person than it is to articulate a silver bullet of a plan (and even if you could come up with a simple and clear one, it may not campaign well because sometimes the right thing to do, like increasing taxes in pretty much any situation that calls for it, is unpopular).

But you never answered, did you? And I'm curious too. No offense intended, by the way. What your native tongue is is just a linguistic curiosity to me.

Lord I had responded to such questions many times on this website of your and it get old after a time with special note that the motivations for such questions are mainly just a means of launching personal attacks.

Now once more I am a six plus generation American and my only language beside a few words in Spanish is English.

I was raised in a small slate mining town in PA and in a small seaside resort town in NJ. See the trash TV show the Jersey Shores in reference to the resort town I grow up in.

The deviations from standard English in my writings had to do with the way my brain is wired and not due to any foreign birth or foreign language background.

I don't intend it that way, I hope that isn't the way it is taken.



That's quite interesting, your ratiocination is clearly better than your English writing implies and I think that's why people sometimes assume you are not a native speaker. At least insofar as I am concerned that was no knock on you, I don't find not being born in America to be a personal failing (after all, I wasn't).

No, but I think water boarding is like tickling compared to the other stuff we outsourced, and I'm not convinced that practice stopped.



I think it was the most immoral act the US has committed in my lifetime.



No I wouldn't. You are just assuming I'm pro-Republican because I criticize Obama and this is something about American politics that drives me insane (happens all the time on these boards, I see people do this very thing all the time).



Not really, they had little to no "ability" 3 years ago and I think their relevance is decreasing largely due to things outside of our control (like the so-called "Arab Spring") or things that had already been put into motion (e.g. the financial attack on Al Qaeda immediately after 9/11 was much more important than all the military actions against it since when it comes to weakening their capacity).

But I think that's the wrong question to begin with. I think the things the US does to fight Al Qaeda cause a greater increase of risk to Americans. A study whose name and author currently eludes me (and I'm travelling on vacation so I can't look for it on my desktop) about bomb manufacturers showed that killing bomb makers often just increased the attacks. Not just because the assassinations motivate people to become your enemy but because the new blood often worked harder than the people they were replacing, who had fallen into a rut of greater complacency.

The single greatest factor that influences the likelihood of these attacks are the supply of candidates and we can't kill them all. Others will replace them. So even if we dismantle Al Qaeda entirely we are making generations of enemies in Pakistan and Afghanistan while we do it and ensuring a steady supply of extremists. The Arab spring is replete with examples of tyrants we supported who acted against the will of the people and their tyranny motivates anti-Americanism when we suppor them and enable their reign. We can't keep playing that game, even if the cause is "anti terrorism" (we were cooperating with Gaddafi on this, for example). In Pakistan the government lies to their people about the permissions the US has to bomb people in their territory etc. They are incensed with the drone strikes in their territory, the CIA operatives who killed people in their streets (including at least one man who was killed when other CIA agents ran over them on their way to extract the killer) and then paid blood money to get them out of jail. Americans would not put up with another country doing that here, and it's foolish to expect this to go over well with others and not expect them to ever have the idea that they should try to bring some of the bloodshed to American territory.

So I don't really think that there's a military solution to this problem. I think terrorism is a problem on police scale, not military scale, and that military solutions rarely work well for it anyway. What has historically worked well was to work towards eliminating the conditions that generate the terrorism. Just like crime, sociological factors are a much greater influence than the way you fight it.

I think the way Obama has prosecuted the war on terror was to largely just keep the status quo, and the status quo on things that I believe are partial root causes for the terrorism in the first place (namely the whole us killing other peoples thing). You can't kill hundreds of thousands of people, and displace millions without making enemies. For whatever America's stated reasons, America has been killing and harming a lot of people and no, I don't think that the parts of that foreign policy that are justified to the public as part of a winning war on terror are making America any safer. We've spilled an awful lot of Afghan blood just to get to those handful of Al Qaeda interlopers in their midst and I don't think it made Americans any safer.

The terrorists are not attacking for no reason, and they don't hate America for the stupid, self-serving reason Americans have been fed: "they hate our freedom." No, they hate our meddling in their countries. They hate our bombings of their weddings (even if accidental we have killed tens of thousands of civilians while prosecuting the "war on terror"), they hate that we support corrupt governments that are in our pockets and against the will of the people they are actually supposed to represent. They hate that we keep the status quo in the middle east (pretty much every nation on earth agrees on what to do there, and America enables Israel to avoid it while building "facts on the ground" and systemically settling disputed territory). They hate their limited economic opportunities and stagnant, corrupt political systems. We are still corrupting governments like Pakistan. Yes, corrupting. We buy it off through military aid, and get them to cut secret deals to infringe on Pakistani sovereignty while lying to the people about it. That would be like a Manchurian candidate scenario to Americans if it were another country subverting their leaders this way.

In Afghanistan we spend much more than the GDP of their country on the war. In fact I bet there were single days in the war where more money was spend bombing them in a single day than their yearly GDP. When we leave (soon) it will not be much different, because the underlying situation has not changed. I posit that spending the equivalent of the GDP of a nation to bomb it is not the best way to reduce the threat America faces and that it is just part of a vicious cycle that seeks to treat symptoms with great, and incredibly harmful, extravagance.

There was a report on BBC News 24 about the growing anger in Pakistan's tribal belt over the use of unmanned drones. There were instances of children and teenagers being bombed, and a substantial amount of cases where victims had been branded terrorists by the government but where tribal leaders said they weren't. There was an interview with a shepherd who had lost both legs and an eye in an attack.

Throughout all of this, the Pakistani Government is being extremely muted in its criticism. If militant Islam appears to be the only thing standing up for tribal people's rights against American aggression, is it any wonder that angry young men flock to groups like Al Qaida in ever increasing numbers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-15532916

Pakistan should control the tribal areas so they are not bases for terrorist groups and if they do not we will continue to need to go in directly or directly to control this danger to the US .

When the government of Pakistan begin to exercise national solvency over this region then they would had a right to complain not before.

As far as crying concerning the tribal area people getting into harm way as long as they are offering aid and comfort to such groups I am not going to cry one tear for them.

Police scale indeed as in Pakistan where they do not control the tribal areas and the areas they do control somehow terrorists are still able to operate almost openly as in Ladin living next door to Pakistan main military school for a decade or so.

I love your idea that we should not kill those who are building bombs ect to kill us as they will be replaced and we can not kill them all.

Footnote a large percent of bomb makers who do not know their trade end up blowing themselves up and their devices are a lot less likely to function correctly so killing bombs makers who know what they are doing even it replaced by new bombs makers is worth doing for that reason alone.

Sorry but there should be some risk assume by mass murderers even if we can not kill all of them.

And you think this attitude makes the world a safer place for Americans?

As when we was not firing missiles out of what appear as empty skies those peace loving people was still eager to give support and shelter to these killers so I question if our hitting back is going to make them more eager to shelter these killers knowing that they could now have themselves and their families wipe out as a cost of their ongoing support.

Sadly, I have to agree with you, Robert.
I had hoped for so much more when the Democrats were elected, but it has just been more of the same, when it comes to "the war on terror".

Not being a US citizen, my major interest/focus, when it comes to election platforms & possible changes of government, is US foreign policy. Which obviously has a huge impact around the world.

I firmly believed at the time, that things would be very different under Obama ... Iraq, Afghanistan, the middle east, Guantanamo .....

Obama's Cairo speech, in 2009, was very inspiring & some of us dared to hope for a fresh, new approach.

Text: Obama’s Speech in Cairo:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html?pagewanted=all

It hasn't happened, of course. Yet so much change as happened in the middle east since that speech!

I think I've become very cynical about US foreign policy. It doesn't appear to make all that much difference which party is in power these days.
It seems to be (war) business as usual.
Why is that so?

I agree that Obama has been lax concerning Iraq and Guantanamo and his campaign speech verses his actions once President. He didn't stick to his timetable in Iraq and he hasn't completely closed Guantanamo although the administration has made some changes there and are seeking to try some of the detainees but have not been successful yet.

However, I don't agree because he continues the war in Afghanistan it follows that he is doing the opposite of the excerpt you posted of his speech in Caro. Not sure of what actions you speak of when referring to middle east unless it was at the UN when he didn't stand by Palestine when they sought statehood. That was disappointing for me as well.

If the people they are sheltering are killers, what are the people using the drones to kill children called?

The thing there though is the midterm elections, and how the Republicans (and the Tea Party) claimed victory in them. There is a great deal of discontent with the incumbents -- ALL of the incumbents -- and that doesn't all get focused on Obama.

So with the right (wrong) opponent, it's quite possible he can sidestep all of that.

I was referring to his proposed new approach .. in his Cairo speech:


Heck, I don't want to screw the Democrats.
I see them as a far better prospect than the conservative alternative.
I was commenting purely on foreign policy issues ....
I am simply sick & tired of the constant US war mongering ... which escalates the "terrorist" problem rather than resolve anything.

Ever since the dawn of time, innocents have been killed in the name of war. If though, we have knowingly killed innocents by those drones without trying to avoid it, I think it is against humanitarian law.

Iraq was not part of the war in which Al Qaeda brought to us on 9/11. But Afghanistan was. The Taliban refused to give up Bin Laden. We got side tracked with the war in Iraq but Obama stepped up the war effort in Afghanistan to go after Al Qaeda who did bring the war to us in the first place. However, we now killed Bin Laden. We have diminished Al Qaeda as good as we ever going to in a military war and I think it is time to end it in Afghanistan even though the country is still as unstable as ever.

I'm just wonder what people expected the US to do after we were attacked on 9/11. Try to negotiate with Bin Laden and just say, even though you were in charge of killing over 3000 people in a single day we are willing to let it go if you promise not to try and kill us anymore? He and Al Qaeda had to pay for that day no matter what in my opinion.

Shame on us for going after mass murderers and if we allow such people free reign in time I am sure they would stop plotting to kill us seeing how we are willing to allow them to kill our citizens without any danger or harm coming to them in return.

They would likely to demand a yearly payment of a few billions dollars also to leave us alone.

Certainly not declare war on an entire country, cause so much death, hardship & destruction on a civilian population who had absolutely nothing to do with harbouring Bin Laden at that time.
Most of whom would most likely not even have be aware of 9/11.

If there was anything I got from recently reading Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea, it was a huge swell of anger about how Pakistan's people have been treated over the past decades. I'm working out what I can do to get something useful from that anger.